Industry colleague Daniel Selman has blogged about an Italian hotel’s pricing error, naming his blog entry as a pun on the popular if slightly-old Barbara von Halle business rules book.
Probably the person meant to validate the hotel room prices was on vacation. Another recent vacation-led event-processing-rule error is a maybe bit closer to home for Daniel and the CEP community, as anyone subscribing to the Yahoo CEP-interest group will have noticed this month. Seemingly one of Daniel’s esteemed IBM Ilog colleagues set an “Out of Office” message on his email for his vacation, which duly bounced a Yahoo group message back to Yahoo.
Which caused Yahoo to promptly publish it as a reply.
Which duly caused another “Out of Office” message back to Yahoo.
Which caused Yahoo to promptly publish it as a reply.
Which duly caused another “Out of Office” message back to Yahoo.
Which caused Yahoo to promptly publish it as a reply.
Ad infinitum, although hopefully the message ping-pong will end when the vacation season ends… Maybe a requirement for an “if repeated message then ignore” rule for at least one of the parties involved? 
Hi Sandy – Heh – good old Lotus Notes! And I say that knowing I’m unlikely to get any sarcastic follow-up emails, simply due to the hassle of using that particular email system!
Cheers
If only IBM used Outlook, which has a built-in rule to only send OOO notifications once to each sender.